Judging Time Read online

  Mike's hand brushed April's arm. She knew what the gesture meant. Everything in their lives had changed, and yet here they were again, back on a case together—she, Mike, and Jason Frank. The ghost of Merrill Liberty was like the wing of a butterfly fluttering against April's cheek. Her heart thudded so loudly in her chest she could almost hear it.

  5

  Well, what do you think then?" Daphne Petersen directed her question at Sanchez, who seemed to expand a few inches under her gaze. The new widow was an intense young woman with big blue eyes, the fairest skin, hair even inkier than April's own, and a voluptuous body clearly visible under her tightly belted satin robe. She spoke with a strong English accent and seemed to enjoy the reaction she was getting from the visiting detective.

  "Ah . . ." Mike stalled. Paired with the pose she had taken, the question seemed to confuse him.

  April made a little disapproving noise through her nose. The victim's wife was supposed to be in shock, not the detective breaking the news. Daphne Petersen, however, was nowhere near shock. She was hardly surprised to see them, nor did she seem to mind being roused before dawn to hear about the death of her husband during the night. She responded to the news with a somewhat detached interest, as if the deceased had been a neighbor with whom she had shared a driveway.

  "What do you mean?" Mike got out at last.

  "Well, do you think it's some sort of drug thing, a hit of some sort? A buy gone wrong? A jealous husband?' ' She tossed her head of black curls that didn't look as if they'd been disturbed by sleep. They bounced back to their former position. The curls framed a face that, at 6:17 in the morning, was not by any means devoid of makeup.

  As April examined her, she wondered if the English lady of the house already knew her husband was dead, and if she had not been alone in the bedroom when they arrived. Daphne Petersen was probably around thirty, some fifteen years younger than her late husband.

  The only feeling the new widow exhibited for the situation was to shudder at the word "hit." Then she sought immediate relief in a package of Marlboros. Unlike Liberty, she expressed no shock or denial. She almost seemed to have been expecting them. April wondered if the woman's detachment might be a cultural thing. From what she had read about the English in the newspapers, it was pretty obvious that they didn't care much about anything. April turned her expressionless face to Mike to see what he thought.

  He was scratching the side of his nose, considering her list of suspects in her husband's death. Drugs, hit men. Jealous husbands. Interesting.

  "Did you know who your husband was with last night?" he asked gently.

  She shook her head. "Who?"

  "Merrill Liberty," April said.

  Daphne's breath caught on a gulp of smoke. "Is she-"

  April nodded.

  "She's dead, too? Jesus!" She looked out the window.

  Outside it was not yet light. The heat was just coming up in the Petersens' Fifth Avenue living room, which faced the fountain still ringed with Christmas trees in front of the Plaza Hotel, the huge menorah on the park side of the street with all its lights ablaze, and the section of Central Park bordering Central Park South. There were so many arresting views available that April hardly knew which way to look. Mike wasn't having any problems on that score. He was concentrated on the widow.

  Daphne's breasts were several cups too large to stand up as high as they did with no visible means of support. April guessed they were not as nature had formed them. She also guessed the robe cost more than a sergeant's salary for several months. But there was no way of estimating the value of the ruby-studded, heart-shaped pendant the size of a plum that dangled from a heavy gold chain just above Daphne's cleavage. Mike raised his crooked eyebrow at April The second trophy wife in the case.

  April nodded imperceptibly as she watched Daphne stub out her cigarette and take a second from the package. Yeah., and this one is the survivor.

  "What do you mean, jealous husband?" April asked.

  "I don't know. I was being smart. I didn't know he'd get mad enough to kill them." Daphne studied the cigarette, then lit it with a match from a giveaway matchbook.

  "Who?"

  "Well, Liberty, of course." She put her hand to her mouth. "They were very close friends—it's hard to—"

  "Liberty and your husband?"

  "Well, the three of them. Tor was best man at their wedding."

  "Did you know where your husband was going last night?"

  Daphne lifted a shoulder. "I wasn't here when he went out."

  "Where were you?"

  She tossed her head. "In church."

  Mike hid a smile.

  "Which one?" April asked.

  "Saint Patrick's."

  "What time was that?"

  "How would I know? I wasn't here."

  "What time did you go out, Mrs. Petersen?"

  "Ten-fifteen. A.M."

  "And that was the last time you saw your husband?"

  She nodded. "How were they killed?"

  "We don't have a cause of death on your husband yet," April said. "He may have died of a heart attack—"

  "What? Really?" The woman blew a cloud of smoke out of her nose. Confused, she tapped the cigarette on the side of a crystal ashtray already full of butts. "I thought you said he was murdered."

  "Did we?"

  "Yes, you said—" She scowled at April. "He wasn't murdered? Then what killed them—drugs . . . ?"

  "Was your husband involved in drugs?" Mike asked.

  "What do you mean 'involved'? You mean selling?" Daphne shook the curls. "He was rich. He didn't need to." She scowled some more. "He did like his snow-flakes though, didn't he?"

  "Your husband was a cocaine user?"

  "Oh yes, and woman user, too." Daphne fondled the heavy ruby heart between her breasts. "He loved rubies,". she murmured. "What about Merrill? Did she have a heart attack, too?"

  "She was stabbed in the neck," Mike said bluntly.

  "O000." Shocked, Daphne clutched her throat. Then she inhaled with a wincing noise. "O000."

  For the ten thousandth time April thought people were weird. First the well-dressed black man with the terrible headache. And now the trophy wife with the artificial boobs who reacted more to the death of Merrill Liberty than to that of her husband. Weird. April felt a tickle at the back of her throat and fought a desire to sneeze. The tickle didn't come from the cigarette smoke. It came from her suspicious nature.

  Mike coughed delicately. "Did you expect your husband home last night?"

  Daphne shrugged. "With Tor, one doesn't expect. One takes things as they come. Most of the time he does come home eventually," she conceded. "What time did he die?"

  "Sometime last night."

  "I was here all evening, if you want to know. All night in fact. Anyway, I'm not powerful enough to give people heart attacks. But Tor was. He gave them all the time." She stubbed out her cigarette, splitting the paper and shredding the tobacco.

  "Would you mind identifying his body later today?" Mike asked suddenly.

  "Oh, is that absolutely necessary? I'm afraid it would make me sick to my stomach."

  "You only have to look at his face through a window," Mike told her.

  "Couldn't you arrange something?" Daphne pleaded. "Send his lawyer or something?"

  April bristled as the cleavage became more pronounced. Of course they could. Mike would see what he could do. April rolled her eyes and made a note to kick him later. The two detectives stayed, asking the dead man's wife questions until the sun rose. Then they went out for breakfast.

  6

  Jason, the last thing in the world I want to do right now is go in that room by myself and lie down." Rick Liberty shot Jason an angry look. "What do you think I am?"

  Emma saw Jason check his watch and gave him a pleading look not to abandon them.

  "I think you've had a terrible shock," Jason replied calmly. "And you're going to have a really rough day." He glanced at Emma to assure her he would stay as
long as he had to.

  "A shock! My wife and best friend go to my own restaurant with my own people all around. Now both of them are dead. No one can tell me what happened. And you want me to lie down!"

  Dr. Jason Frank, psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry, was a man well accustomed to hearing other people vent their grief and rage. He ached for his friend and didn't argue. His own wife was still alive. She sat on the white sofa clutching one of Merrill's sweaters and holding Rick's hand as if he were a child. Emma had been Merrill's best friend, a bridesmaid at her wedding. She'd left the two victims to come home to him only minutes before they were killed. He ached for Emma, too.

  Jason stood with his back to the window and the dawning day. Over the years as a psychoanalyst, he had seen a lot of illness both physical and mental, and a lot of self-destruction played out in a wide variety of ways. He'd seen death come in many forms. The endless repetition of tragedies and sorrow that constituted the human condition had always affected him, but until a year ago he had never experienced the catastrophe of a vicious crime against anyone he knew.

  He had grown up with a basketball in his hands, a street kid in the Bronx always looking for a pickup game. He'd carried a knife in his pocket and been in fights, but he'd never cut anybody and nobody had ever cut him. Until he was in medical school he'd never seen a gunshot wound or a knife wound or a battered body. Since then he'd seen a number of them, but none of the violence had been connected with him. He was a thirty-nine-year-old psychiatrist who wrote scholarly papers and taught medical students and psychiatric residents and now even Ph.D. candidates how to think about the mind. His had been an orderly life, and though he would never have admitted it, a cerebral one.

  He was also a collector of antique clocks. He would have liked to meet the person who invented the first mechanical device to measure time. He himself was ruled by time, obsessed by it. For many years his only fear was that his own time would run out before he was finished with his life's work. But a year ago he'd learned there were many worse fears than that.

  A year ago Emma had starred in a film that triggered her kidnapping. Until then, his only connection with the police was as a source of directions when he was lost. Now he was so close to several NYPD detectives that he had actually been relieved when Rick told him an Asian woman called Woo and a Hispanic with a big mustache were in charge of this case. That meant every step of the way Jason would know what was going on. That gave him some comfort.

  Jason checked his watch again, wondering when he could get in touch with April. It was the first Monday of the new year. Jason's day was completely booked with eight patient hours, an hour and a half of teaching, and thirty minutes with the psychiatric resident he was supervising. He had canceled his first four patients and was now debating canceling the class. He was still hoping he could get Rick to take something to calm down before having to view Merrill's body at the medical examiner's office.

  "Do you know how many needles were stuck into me so I could run down that field?" Rick demanded angrily. "Sometimes an eye or my nose swelled up— twenty degrees outside—and I could feel the blood on my face so hot it burned." He shook his head at his old life of the killer instinct: eleven broken bones, countless sprains, and constant physical pain. He turned his back on Jason to stare out the window.

  The spectacular city view of the present embraced lower Central Park from the west. The high-floor apartment faced east, and the three of them could have watched the sun rise at 7:03 if there had been one to see. But there had been no visible sunrise that day. The light had come slowly, almost painfully slowly, and only revealed a morning as bleak and silent as the night had been wild.

  "I took so many painkillers. . . . God, by the time I was eighteen, nineteen, no one had to tell me anything about what was going on inside of my body. I knew it all. I could hear things happen. Does that sound weird? I could hear the injuries. And there was a lot of screaming going on, a whole lot all around me, from the coaches, my family, every human being who had ever been a slave in all of history."

  Liberty paused, looking back on himself and the burden he'd carried for every slave in all of history. "I knew they would get together and kill me if I stopped. I knew if I stopped, if I cried, if I said anything, my life would be over. I had to play the game, because it was the game of life. You know what I'm talking about? Everybody was nice to me. I heard nice things, you know, but I knew I had no friends. I was alone. I couldn't do anything else but take the needles and play ball. I had no choice."

  Jason was surprised to hear this. They'd talked about football before, had even watched games together, but Jason had not heard him talk like this before.

  "Maybe I shouldn't tell you this," Rick muttered, glancing nervously at Emma as if he feared he'd just ruined his image.

  "You forget that I know you from then," Emma reminded him. "I know who you are."

  The two friends made an interesting contrast. Emma was like a ghost, bleached white, with her blond hair a little darker than usual for her theater role and her deep blue eyes now dulled with shock. Beside her, Rick Liberty was a warm medium brown. Both white and Indian blood showed in his cheekbones, his jaw-line, his lips and nose. Everything about his speech, his gestures, the confidence and grace with which he moved, bespoke a man who had grown up not far from where he sat right now. Nothing about him seemed tutored or strained. He was like a white man with brown skin, a man who never talked about his color, and didn't want to be asked. Jason suddenly thought that pretending there was absolutely no difference between them except exceptional athletic prowess had probably been a very bad thing for them all.

  "You know you can tell us anything, Rick," Jason said.

  "Then don't think I'm proud of myself. Everybody used to tell me I should be so proud of what I've accomplished. That's bullshit—" Rick held his head with the hand not restrained by Emma's.

  "No one should be proud of begging to be anaesthetized so they can hurt themselves some more. You know, I used to tell them to give me the max. 'Gimme the damn max,' I used to say." He snorted derisively. "I had a knee injury once they didn't pick up for a year. They stuck me so full of shit sometimes I didn't feel my legs at all. Everybody says I was so fucking fast in that game against the Cowboys. So fast, I ran with the ball farther than anyone in history. Well, I still don't know how I even stood up that day. I wasn't there. Part of me just wasn't there. The other part was doing what it always did—looking down the field, looking to get through that wall of defense to the other side. Just looking for a hole.

  "Hell, it didn't matter to me. I just kept going even when there was no hole. I didn't care if I died, and that's the truth. If I'd died then it would have been over. I used to hope for it. I used to hope every three-hundred-pound linebacker would pile up on me at the same time and crush me to death. But I was a valuable player. They wouldn't let it happen." Rick's face showed pure rage. "Shit, man, I'm not taking any more pills to hide from anything."

  "How's that head?" Jason asked.

  Rick ignored him. "And don't tell me about the good part, the adrenaline rushes, the thrills, the cheers, the money. Truth was I just didn't give a shit. I wanted to die and end it."

  "How's the head?"

  "I don't know. It doesn't matter."

  Jason raised his hand to scratch the three-month-old beard he couldn't seem to get used to. He was worried that Rick would collapse soon. And Emma was not in any better shape. When she'd come into the apartment several hours ago she'd been trembling so badly that Rick offered her one of Merrill's sweaters to put on.

  No! Jason almost grabbed Rick to stop him. Possessions of the dead are powerful things. Each object resonated with meaning. Jason knew many families that had been torn apart over a few dollars no one needed but someone didn't want to give up. Or a vintage car, a table, an antique chair, a crystal necklace, a china plate. Some of the most precious memories people have live on in objects. Survivors often have no idea how much feeling they have invest
ed in a certain something until the person who owned it is gone.

  Rick went into the bedroom and returned with a tan chenille sweater with black trim. He was holding it to his face as he offered it to Emma. "Here, she loved this one. It smells like her."

  Emma took it with a sob and buried her face in the sweater, holding it in her arms for a long time, her cheek pressed against its softness. Jason, the shrink who couldn't stop analyzing everything, knew he had no control over what would happen next. He was surprised that the scent and the feel of the dead woman's sweater eventually calmed Emma, and she put it on.

  "You know, Rick, you were an inspiration to watch," Jason said softly, knowing they were discussing Rick's career to avoid dealing with his wife's murder.

  "Well, the truth was I was depressed, Jason. I was so depressed I didn't know life existed. I'm telling you I kept hoping one day they'd all pile up on me and break my neck so it would be over. I didn't know any better."

  Jason gave him a crooked smile. "You were a great football player. You accomplished more in those years than ninety-nine percent of the population. And look what you've accomplished since. You're quite a guy and a lot of people love you."

  "Uh-huh. Well, he let me stop."

  "What?" Jason asked.

  "Tor. It was Tor who showed me life outside. Tor and Merrill. They showed me I could have a life. I could do something without hurting myself. They made me even—equal. Do you know what that means? I stopped being a black boy who could play ball. They gave me my life, man. They were the only ones who loved me. And now they're dead. I swear to God. Jefferson is going to pay for this."

  The phone rang. "You stay here. I'll get it," Jason told him. He went into the gallery to pick up. It was a woman from a tabloid-sounding TV show, wanting to set up an interview. Jason told her none would be forthcoming. When he hung up, the phone rang again. Jason repeated the same thing, then checked his watch. It was 9:07. The switchboards of the world were open.